devsk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:01:40 -0800:
> Why is a portage daemon such a bad thing? Or hard to do? I would very > much like a daemon running on my system which I can configure to sync > the portage tree once a week (or month if I am lazy), give me a summary > of hot fixes, security fixes in a nice email, push important > announcements and of course, sync caches on detecting changes (which > should be trivial with notify daemons all over the place) etc. Why is it > such a bad thing? > > Its crazy to think that security updates need to be pulled in Linux. Well, this is more a user list discussion than a portage development discussion, but... For one thing, it's terribly inefficient to keep a dozen daemons running checking only a single thing each, each week, when we have a cron scheduling daemon, and it's both efficient and The Unix Way (R) to setup a script to do whatever you need it to do, and then have the cron daemon run each of a dozen different scripts once each week, instead of having those dozen different daemons running constantly when they're only active once a week. IOW, it only requires a manual pull if you've not already setup cron to invoke an appropriate script once a week, and that involves only a single constantly running daemon, the cron daemon of your choice. Now, perhaps it can be argued that there should be a package that installs such a pre-made script. For all I know, maybe there is one already. And perhaps it can be argued that said script, if optional, should at least be mentioned in the handbook. I couldn't argue with the logic of either of those. But there's no reason to run yet another daemon constantly, when (1) it's not needed constantly, and (2), there's already a perfectly functional way of scheduling something to run when it /is/ needed, complete with optional results mailing, etc, if it's scripted to do that. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
